The Price of the Ticket
On May 28th, 2012 Staci Mcvey died of a heroin overdose in Akron, Ohio. I always knew that at some point I would have to write about it, but I was scared to think of what, and how. I wasn't even sure what could be parsed from something so tragic. Out of the scores of dead friends, classmates, bandmates, and acquaintances, I only ever eulogized one, and him in a way so hopelessly self-absorbed and exploitative that he wasn't even really present in the text. Not that I didn't truly love him or that his death didn't profoundly devastate me. It's more that in the arrogant bluster of youth, you use tragedy any way you can, even to glorify yourself, rather than try to actually deal with it.
In the time since then, 2004, when Tyler laid on the tracks under the Haymaker Bridge in Kent and got hit by a train, there's been no shortage of death. You get used to it in a way; hearing about death. When it comes to shallow acquaintances and old classmates sometimes you're even secretly relieved it wasn't someone who meant more to you. Then there are the other ones, the big deaths, the ones that hit close to home, and scare you, or more just bewilder you in their senselessness. For me, Staci's was one of those.
I met Staci when I was 21, in 2005, through her mother. Her mother had been dating a friend of mine, an older guy who was squatting an apartment on the corner where I and the biggest chunk of the Kent, Ohio punk scene were living, next to Crock's Car Care. Her mother wanted to set us up, and one night after a show I managed to convince Staci to come along with me as I stole her mother's car and drove to an abandoned house next to a rock quarry. Afterwards, we ended up dating for a few months. In all honesty, our relationship was fairly brief, and I didn't much see her afterward, aside from bumping into her at shows and bars around Kent and Akron. I doubt that our time together was a landmark event in her life, but for me, she was huge. I never told her, but I lost my virginity to her. She was hilarious, and beautiful, and incredibly smart. She would get wasted on 110 proof vodka mixed with Kool Aid and act like a goof. She was always down for anything stupid if it might be fun, and quit her phone center job just to hang out the day after we stole her mom's car. She really loved and cared for her family, and nurtured her younger sister. She wasn't petty and jealous, or filled with impotent rage like me and most of my friends.
She also had a predilection for intravenous drugs. At the time, I had gone from snorting Aderall and Ritalin to doing coke whenever I could afford it, but the stuff she was into freaked me out. Thinking about it now, a 20 year old girl shooting cocaine and heroin, gives me chills, and even though it worried the shit out of me then, and was the reason we ultimately broke up, it also served to fill out the fearlessness of her personality in my mind. Staci, defiant and unflinching, even in the face of death.
She died when I was 28, working a temp job mixing dirt at a plant nursery in Texas. I saw it on my lunch break when I checked Facebook on the company computer, walked off of the nursery and across the street, and promptly threw up in a Subway parking lot. That night I got black out drunk and balled my eyes out. After that I didn't know what else to do. Outside of immense grief for her mother, sister, and brother, I didn't know what to feel. I had talked to her around the previous Christmas, and she told me to call her when I was back in Ohio, which I didn't. I wasn't worried about her. She seemed like she was doing well. She had put on some weight, and was in a relationship with what appeared to be, at least from afar, a pretty normal guy. I was happy for her. It seemed like we had both made it out of that amorphous, menacing cloud of hopelessness and fury and self abuse in the Rust Belt that was killing so many. And when she died I had just bought my ticket for Greece. I was trying to get my head above water and move on to something else, something better than Texas, and Subway parking lots, and piles of dirt. I couldn't dive into the process of thinking about her; thinking about Ohio.
* * * *
Immigration is a painful process. The more I go through it, the more I understand my grandfather, his rage. No matter how much you assimilate to your adopted country, and no matter how preferable it is, there's an alienation that cuts to your very sense of identity. It's not just an alienation of place, or of culture- never again seeing a city covered in snow or the mist of dawn that comes up so hazy and soft on jagged industrial architecture; or the unshakable otherness of speaking with an accent and having grown up in a so vastly different than your friends and family. It's also an alienation of time, because your place, and with it a large part of your identity, are frozen in the moment when you leave. The place continues to exist, develop, live and breath, and you do as well, just without it. The more you fail to completely homogenize with your new surroundings (which you always will,) the more you search for identity in the idea of your home. But that idea is frozen- something essentially static, dead, nonexistent. I haven't been back to Ohio in almost 7 years, and before that, I hadn't been back for another 4. I'm married and I own an apartment in Thessaloniki, Greece. If I ever have a family, it will be here. I love Ohio, all of its hardship, and how it raised me. I keep in regular touch with my best friend, who stayed in Akron and started a family, but still, the most common news I get from Ohio is the constant stream of premature deaths. I know it's more than just a pile of bodies, and that what all of these people succumb to is just a small part of a very deep and involved place and its culture- a culture that produced me and most of the people I love in the world. I know that you need to look deeply at it and separate the light from the pain, the joy from the agony. But the truth is, I'm scared to look. I'm scared to try and dissect it. Probably because what killed Staci, and Tyler, and Shuv, and Russ, and so many others, could have just as easily killed me, or any of us who grew up in that place and time. That I didn't manage to survive it because I'm stronger, or smarter, or less reckless- it was just luck. And that's the deepest sadness. Their ends weren't the final acts of Shakespearean tragedies always predestined to fateful deaths- they were just accidents. A drug overdose is an accident. A suicide is a fleeting moment of desperation. What was lost in these accidents weren't moribund souls riddled by darkness marching to an inexorable end- they were bright, beautiful, creative, and loving people. People whose lives were full of joy and sorrow and affections and fears, no matter how they ended. People who I was lucky to have let me into their lives even for the briefest of moments. People like Staci. And I owe her for that.
* * *
It's cold as hell outside and every time the wind blows the windows all rattle in their frames. I taped up black, plastic garbage bags against them, but they puff up with cold air at every gust, then deflate, leaking the freezing air slowly into the house. Staci and I are in the bathtub. It was my brilliant idea, to warm up, but the bath is far too small for the two of us and the little bit of warm water that fits around our bodies has already turned cold. I'm on my back, and she's naked on top of me, facing me as strands of her red and black hair dangle into the water. On the surface float small pools of oil from our bodies.
“Well this was a fucking genius idea,” she says, the left corner of her mouth curling up in its usual, sardonic smile. “Let's get pneumonia because you're horny.”
I smile back, and try to be self effacing, but as usual with her, I just can't think of anything to say. I can try to be funny, but she's wittier than me, so never impressed. Luckily, we're still in the honeymoon period, so my oafish incompetence and awkward silences are still condisered “cute.”
“I'm sorry, none of the houses out here have insulation. I could put the heat at 80, but it still wouldn't change anything.” The houses in Brady Lake are all like that. They were constructed as summer homes back when the area was able to sustain such things economically. Now they are all inhabited year round by people who suffer through the winters in exchange for low rent and summers next to water. The lake, however, remains unchanged and sits slumbering, frozen and sheeted in snow, 50 feet from my door.
“It's okay,” she says. “If it stays this cold we can go to my mom's in Green tomorrow. We can have the basement.” She flashes me another smile, this time more sincere, and I take comfort in the pity in her voice.
“Yeah, I don't work this weekend. That sounds good.”
I take my hand out of the water, and trace my finger along her pale shoulder, on her HR Geiger tattoo. Her skin dimples from the cold and she reflexively squeezes her shoulders together, pressing her lithe body closer to mine. I embrace her tightly, feeling her warmth.
“Alright hotshot,” she says. “You ready to get out and try to not freeze?”
“Not yet,” I reply. “ Just one second more.”
Dedicated with love and understanding to the memories of Staci Mcvey, Tyler Gaston, Joshua “Shuv” Maher, Russel Brill, Caitlin Clingman, Dan Yanigloss, David Bortmas, Chris Bott, and Michael Pierce
-Thessaloniki, May 2023
